The Regressive Left Is Losing The Campus War

A turning point is underway in the culture wars over American universities. Dismayed by their wild-eyed radicalism and anti-intellectual demands, college faculties, administrators, and much of the media are turning their backs on the regressive left.

Previously quick to take the side of students demanding “safety” from offensive speech (Minnesota’s faculty quickly complied with activist’s demands to censor Charlie Hebdo, for example), it now seems that colleges administrators have had enough with the regressive left.

Of course, these efforts feel a little like Pandora trying to close her box — campus faculties trying to contain campus crazies they themselves helped create.

The campus crazies are still winning some victories, like Princeton and Harvard’s removal of the academic title “Master” over complaints that it conjured memories of slavery. But the flames of resistance are quickly flickering to life. Allies of the regressive left grow harder to find, while new opponents appear every day. After all, the regressive types manufacture a new enemy everytime they decide that an ally or a sympathiser isn’t ideologically pure enough for them.

The regressive left played into the hands of its opponents with hysterical responses to recent visits to U.S campuses from Breitbart Tech editor Milo Yiannopoulos and Professor Christina Hoff Sommers of the American Enterprise Institute.

For the educational establishment, these emotionally incontinent reactions serve as further proof that the regressive left is out of control. It is now almost impossible to deny that their activism on campus breeds a climate of intellectual and political intolerance, masked by a thin veil of concern for mental health. As conservatives have been saying for some time, the regressive left is made up of crybullies — seamlessly switching between aggressors and victims depending on the circumstances.

From another perspective, these universities are failing at their basic task of creating intellectually robust young people capable of rational thought, discourse, and debate. If their entire world shatters when presented with opposing views, how will they survive the stress and daily challenges of the jobs market? Even burger-flippers have to occasionally handle rude customers. McDonalds won’t be installing a safe space for their employees anytime soon. Their only option will be the burgeoning profession of diversity consultancy, where no-one gets fired due to companies’ fear of being labelled bigots.

Beyond leftovers of 1970s-era radicalism like Missouri’s recently-fired assistant professor Melissa Click, many academics have realised the threat posed by the regressive left to the intellectual life of American campuses. Even before the events of Yiannopoulos and Sommers’ tour, they were taking cautious steps to fight the regressive left. For example, a growing number of colleges have embraced the Chicago Principles. Published by the University of Chicago in 2012, the principles call for discussion of “offensive” ideas, and affirm that “without a vibrant commitment to free and open inquiry, a university ceases to be a university.”

Even Rani Neutill, who on paper represents the ideal academic of the regressive left – woman, feminist, ethnic minority, film studies lecturer – published an account of her disastrous run-ins with students’ demands for “trigger warnings” on potentially offensive content, which forced her to abandon a course on sex and cinema.

“Colleges are the new helicopter parents, places where the quest for emotional safety and psychic healing leads not to learning, but regression” wrote Neutill.

I’ve heard of some college campuses where they don’t want to have a guest speaker who is too conservative, or they don’t want to read a book if it had language that is offensive to African Americans or somehow sends a demeaning signal towards women.”

I’ve got to tell you, I don’t agree with that either — that you when you become students at colleges, you have to be coddled and protected from different points of view.

As for students themselves, the regressive left no longer has a monopoly on campus activism. Their radicalism, unchecked for so many years, has led to a backlash from moderates, libertarians and conservatives on campus. They may be quieter, but if student turnout at Yiannopoulos events is anything to go by, they far outnumber their left-wing counterparts.

The regressive left even faces the prospect of the alternative right’s arrival on campus, who respond to the left’s identity politics with an equally radical identity politics of their own. Although initially pegged as a hoax by Buzzfeed, the “white student unions” that emerged on college campuses in the wake of the Missouri protests are the product of a genuine, if clandestine, mobilization of alt-right students.

Their emergence is likely to hasten efforts by administrators to quell radicalism on campus, lest colleges become the sites for a stand-off between identity warriors from both the left and the right.

There is a growing realization among all sides of the establishment, from college administrations to the President himself, that student censorship on campus has gone too far. Left-wing activists now face hostility from the left, the centre, and the right (who, after years of warnings about radicalism on campus, are no doubt feeling a great sense of vindication) as well as the mainstream media.

While their opponents have yet to agree on a plan of action against the campus left, there is now clear agreement that something must be done. From now on, the regressive left is on the defensive.